


Peace Taught by the Battles Told

by MaethoMixup



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Broken Bones, Broken Everything, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I lied it's pretty gay, Mission Fic, Unreliable Narrator, gay if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2019-08-28 08:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16719885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaethoMixup/pseuds/MaethoMixup
Summary: Heroes aren’t meant to fail or die, but that’s all Kakashi has ever known. He expects to add a new name to the Memorial Stone after every failed mission and this time is no exception.“Do you still save damsels?” Kakashi asks, barely a whisper, too afraid of being heard by whoever has been chasing them from that blood-soaked grass to here.There's a rumble inside Genma’s chest — a shuddered giggle — and his eyes slant towards the only one Kakashi has open. “That's what you’re thinking about right now?”“Yeah,” he admits through the fog of his own brain.“Well,” he says, hiking Kakashi tighter into his hold. “I’m saving your sorry ass. I'm pretty sure that counts.”





	1. The Promises Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you to [LinSetsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinSetsu/pseuds/LinSetsu) for her amazing support, ideas, and cheerleading skills! This story truly wouldn't have gotten past the first scene if it wasn’t for her. If you like this story, please check out hers as well! Another thank you goes to BakeKitsune for the wonderful brainstorm session we had! 
> 
> Please let me know what you think, good or bad. I super appreciate all forms of feedback! Thanks for reading!
> 
> For clarity: This is set during the time-skip.

* * *

 

“Where does the sun go?” Rin asked, hand outstretched, a tapestry of stars weaving between her fingers. Her brows furrowed, pout pulling tight at one side as she contemplated the sky above them. “It’s got to go _somewhere_ , right?”

Obito laid on Kakashi’s other side. He laughed, swung his arms wide enough to encompass the night. “I bet it’s afraid of the dark!” 

Kakashi swatted his elbow away before it made contact with his chest. “That's stupid.”

“Yeah, that doesn't sound right,” she mumbled and huffed, but she turned her autumn gaze towards him. “Where do you think it goes, Kakashi?”

The moon above them was half hidden behind clouds and darkness, but Kakashi focused on it, on the size and shape and its similarities to the sun, and remembered old tales about men with two faces. One shining and friendly, the other broken and angry. 

“It dies,” he concluded, because two faced men reminded him of only one man. 

Rin frowned. “And it comes back to life each day?”

“Now _that's_ stupid,” Obito declared with a huff of his own. “The dead don't come back. That’s why they’re _dead_.”

She leaned up enough to shoot him a glare. “Don't be so depressing, Obito.”

“You’re right.” He grinned, pushing his elbow into Kakashi’s side on purpose this time. “That’s his job, isn’t?”

* * *

Pain is like a river; ever flowing, never stopping. The tides ebb and flow with each compounding wound, digging deep. 

Deeper. 

More, Kakashi thinks, stepping forward and allowing the sword to slide further into his gut. He grabs ahold of the surprised shinobi, brings their neck into his own weapon. They drop the hilt, but the blade stays inside him, wobbling, teetering above a ligament. The sharp edge teases between survival and certain death. 

Blood splatters from them both and he doesn’t care — he can’t, lest he falter.

The man falls dead. Kakashi staggers without their weight to balance himself on, reaching blindly to find a tree, finds nothing, plants his feet only barely. Explosions rock the perimeter and the aftershocks screech like a forgotten teakettle. His footing catches on uneven ground as it splits apart and he lurches away, tumbles and slides past the crater.

The stench of sulfur drenches the wind, carrying the dull ticking of a gas burner from the slate stone clusters at his heels. Kakashi glances down, sees an explosive tag and switches himself with a corpse before his clothes catch aflame. The ringing begins anew; he’s too close to the epicenter. Heat and debris sweep by his bare cheeks. 

Mission. Clarity.

Find the source, his training urges.

Left. Twenty meters. Enemy: blue shirt, fast hands, madness on their lips. They throw another tag into the fray of bodies filling the clearing, injuring the environment more than flesh. 

Kakashi takes a step forward, then another and one more. He’s limping, swaying as if on purpose, but it’s not enough to avoid the dart he sees coming, and he’s not quick enough to dodge. Serrated edges corkscrew into his shoulder, dig deep through muscle to embed in bone, and he grunts, stumbles further, dances close. 

They lift their arms. “You piece of — "

His fist finds their face. They don’t die; they sneer as if he’d inconvenienced them, and Kakashi laughs because that’s a funny thought.

Another punch. _More_. He doesn't stop until his knuckles breach their skull, head bursting like egg on concrete. Their innards ooze out, ruined along with that silly, out-of-place expression, and he laughs again because this is a mission and he’s not suppose to feel anything else. 

Not love nor regret nor the happiness he feels when past voices trickle into his movements, reminding him how to set his stance, hold his kunai, stretch his spine. 

“Watch your left,” one phantom says. He listens, deflects a shuriken.

“Balance your weight,” says someone else, voice young - too young to be here. 

Mission. Complete the mission, the ghost of his father whispers. Somehow, Kakashi doesn’t believe that’s him. He remembers his father glorifying more than victory, yet that doesn’t matter here. In this battlefield of broken dreams and dying men, victory is all he can hope for — all he wants — because everything else is expecting too much. 

Kakashi trips over a body. He hadn’t known her prior to this assignment. Her black ops mask sits near her feet, white porcelain scattered across the flattened grass. 

Her torso is missing and he doesn’t search for it. Too late, he knows.

Too late, he fears, as he looks across the red meadow, sees people crumbling and not getting up. He kills another before he falls into place alongside an ally, and his ally dies before either of them can say hello.

“Hello,” he says anyways, because that’s funny too, to say it to the dead. 

Of course they don’t respond, and Kakashi feels insane for thinking they might. 

And maybe he is insane. Maybe this is just a dream — a nightmare. A fantasy.

Two of his fingers find a man’s eyes, bursting them, but he moves on. They’re too heavily armored for Kakashi to kill without chakra and he has long since run empty. He’s fueled by adrenaline, begging for it to last this battle, pleading with his muscles to remember what his mind can’t.

They don’t. A weapon slashes at him.

Pain is like a river, he chants, parrying death away from the artery in his arm. Kakashi’s kunai knocks the scythe to the side with a steel screech and he bends his wrist, swooping down then up, surging towards their heart. They jump away before metal meets skin and send a waterspout in retaliation, made quick from slow hand signs, and still Kakashi can’t dodge. The boiling water floods into every wound, turns cloth molten against flesh. His stance holds under the pressure until he can't. He just — can't — and his heels slip before the rest of him follows. 

Kakashi slams into a tree and wonders where it had been earlier when he’d been searching for a crutch.

Wood pushes the sword in his gut free and blood follows too rapid for him to stop. His hand presses at the wound anyways, because it’s reflex to want to live, but it’s useless. He looks to where he knows a medic is.

Their intestines trail to what’s left of the body: legs dangling from an axe and arms stuck in hardened mud. 

Kakashi’s still laughing; he hasn’t stopped. Hysteria is a defense mechanism and it’s the only shield he has left to guard against the approaching men as they step around the medic’s remains, weapons drawn and muscles taut.

Mission, the voice still urges. Complete the mission. 

He smiles. Perhaps he’ll be able to say hello in the afterlife.

* * *

He awakens to a dark canopy blurred with starlines, twinkling madly, and a fire crackling beside him. It’s almost peaceful, except the constellations are unfamiliar and his limbs are bound tight. His strength is too drained to struggle against the flat planks aligning his back.

Kakashi tests his hands to see if a weapon is within reach. No response. They’re numb from the collarbone down. 

“So you’re not dead, eh?” a voice says, familiar. He can’t turn to see who it is, but their face shifts into place above where he lays, smirk heavy, eyes heavier, and bandages wound tight around their throat. “Stop squirming. You’ll aggravate your wounds, and I sure as shit don't have time to play doctor with you again.”

“ _Genma_ ,” he rasps through the thickness of drugs.

He raises a brow. “Are we doing this? Right now? You’re near death and I’m right behind you because someone, and I won’t name the idiot, decided walking into a katana was the best way to kill his enemy.”

Kakashi’s responding look isn’t quite threatening, but it's weary enough to get his point across. Genma sighs. 

“Sea salt winds find sandy skirts,” he says. “Which is still the dumbest identification code I’ve ever been given, and I once had Jiraiya as a team captain.” Genma pauses. “You got that line from his book, didn't you?”

Relief soothes panic and his muscles relax as much as the bindings allow. “Maybe,” Kakashi admits.

He scoffs, but a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth, “I thought you were better than that.”

“Blame my head injury.”

Genma snorts. “You weren't wounded back in Konoha. Your turn, by the way.”

“The midnight sparrow tackles its prey,” he says, amused at the eyeroll sent away from him. He continues, “Are there any other survivors?” 

He remembers seeing one of their heads rolling in the grass just before the men had dragged him from the splintered tree.

“No. Dead,” Genma answers. “I left their bodies. Getting yours was priority.”

Kakashi can’t fault him. He knows the mission, knows their village; the foreign eye within his socket is more important than both. “Why didn’t you cut it out?”

“Fuck, Kakashi, you really think I would? You were still breathing.” He glares, honeybee brown darkening to an angry black. His senbon cigarette dangles low, held dangerously between his lips like a pin waiting to drop, and Kakashi’s reminded suddenly of home, of poker nights with the boys and laughter that perhaps he had only ever dreamed of. 

“Do it,” Genma would say from across a green table each free Friday night, glancing above a pair of cards, daring Kakashi to bluff his seven-two suit into a royal flush. 

This man wears that same daring expression under loose hair and grime, crouching over Kakashi’s prone form.

“Yes,” Kakashi lies. He never says no to a challenge.

“Fuck you,” Genma decides on, leaning back out of view. “Fuck you and your stupid death wish, you stupid, fucking man. I wasn't leaving you to die. You really think that?”

“Yes,” he says again.

“Fuck.”

“And the asset?” Kakashi asks.

"That transition wasn't even smooth." Genma sneers, Kakashi hears it within the undertone of his words. "Try harder if you want me to stop calling you out on your hypocritical bullshit."

“Genma.” His voice cracks between syllables, breath pained, ribs aching, but there’s still a mission pulling his mind from the gutters of sleep. Their asset had been a diplomat traveling from the Waterfall villages to one hidden within a rice field. They had been paid to protect him and his ferret on this journey. 

“He died after you were grabbed. Ran away, directly into an explosion. Cowards should at least have a good directional sense if running is all they’re good for.”

He groans, though he’s not surprised. “He wasn’t their target, then.”

“No,” Genma agrees. “They went towards you first. We didn’t have a plan for that. The others couldn’t adapt.” Kakashi thinks he hears him laugh, but the sound of wood thrown onto the campfire blankets the tremors. “They were new recruits. This was their first mission. Either it’s coincidence, or it was planned.”

The heat grows next to them.

“Maybe I’m just too cynical,” he adds. 

“Cynical?” It’s Kakashi’s turn to laugh. “Call it pragmatic.”

“I’ll call it whatever the hell I want,” he says, nudging him with his toes. “I’m not the one lying half-dead. You know we’re not out of Rice country, right? That means all your shit should be kept on silent until we either make it through Sound or Hot Water, and who knows who’s following us.” He sighs, runs a hand through his hair and continues, “Orochimaru is our best case scenario, and that's saying something. At least with him we know what to expect.”

“Probably not him.”

“Yeah,” Genma says, settling in closer to the flames and fanning the smoke away, “but maybe one of his lackeys. Or worse, an ally. That’d be my luck. Finally finding Akatsuki during a dumb escort mission.”

His voice stays steady, but his foot taps the dirt. One, two. One, two. It’s the music of a nervous man.

Kakashi tries to look at him, tries to see his face and feelings, but the brace prevents him from moving anything more than his knees and numbness envelops the rest. “My arms,” he starts. Stops.

“Just medicine. Got rid of the poison,” he says. “It won’t last our trip home, but there should be enough to prevent infection. Why? Did you need to piss or something?”

“No.” Kakashi hopes to save that embarrassment for when he’s desperate. “The ones who ambushed us, did you kill them?”

“All but that armored one. His eyes were busted. Due to you, I’m guessing?” He chuckles, shifts so his smirk is revealed by the firelight. “He was flailing next to where you were passed out, screaming for his mother.”

Kakashi hums instead of nods. “No way to cut through him.”

“I know,” Genma agrees. “I tried too.”

* * *

The rising sun burns bright through the leaves. Slivers of light sprinkle onto the dying embers of their campsite, each sunbeam searing orange onto his closed lids. When he opens one, the color lingers, dazzling him until he blinks it away.

“Good morning,” Genma says from nearby. “Sea salt winds find sandy skirts, in case you’re worried.”

He grunts a response and tests his jaw, ignoring Genma to analyze what he hadn’t the night before. Bandages made from torn clothes wrap around the majority of his body, secured by wire and rope and knots hastily done. His mask is missing, but there’s a vague memory of it being ripped from his face during a scuttle through the trees. 

A glance at his teammate confirms that he hadn’t escaped unscathed either. Besides the neck wound Kakashi had noticed before, his pants had been reduced to scraggy shorts by savage flames. Red splotches spiral down his legs, blisters decorating the burns like bloated polka dots. 

The brace around his neck tightens as he attempts to roll onto his side, and Kakashi abandons the movement before he snaps the wood. He sighs. 

“Can you — " he starts, but his voice shatters into a sandstorm of pain as the words tumble through his throat.

“Shit!” Genma shouts, twigs clattering from his lap. His head pops into view along with a canteen and he flicks open the lid, grabs Kakashi’s chin, forces his mouth wide enough to trickle water into. “Shit, I'm sorry! I'm sorry. Are you okay?”

Kakashi nods, not trusting his body with anything more difficult. 

“I'm the worst doctor, aren't I?” he asks. He has the nerve to grin, but his lips fall flat and his hand drifts from Kakashi’s growing stubble to the fabric securing the brace in place, fingers a delicate pinprick where they rest. “I'm going to check your wounds, okay? Most of this I can't fix, but you’re stable, and in a few days you might be able to walk if your fever clears up.” 

Kakashi’s eye flickers down to his legs.

“Nothing wrong with those,” Genma assures him. “It's your stomach I'm worried about. You suffered more blood loss than the pills could replenish.” 

He exhales sharply, sets the canteen beside him and pulls the strap of his bag towards them. “We don't have as much time as I would like.” The top flap snaps up and he reaches inside. Metal jangles against plastic and Kakashi sees the blunted edges of their meager arsenal push into the outer tweed. “I snagged this pouch from an enemy corpse while escaping. Nothing here to identify them, of course. That would be too easy.”

Genma shakes his head as he takes a med kit into his arms. Kakashi watches him, listening, but he doesn't share his thoughts, doesn't tell him to leave, to run without Kakashi’s deadweight dragging them both to their demise. 

Doesn't beg him to stay, either. Because he's selfish like his father, but he won't admit it out loud.

His wounds are dressed and replaced, and Genma slumps down beside him with the bag between them. “I miss home,” he murmurs. Kakashi feels his chin against his shoulder, forehead pressed into his neck, and Genma shudders a breath down his spine, like a whimper he hadn't meant to give life to. 

They tremble in each other’s warmth until there's too much sunlight and not enough excuses.

* * *

A week later, Genma still carries Kakashi on his back. 

A heavy breeze takes pollen from the branched flowers surrounding them. Without his mask or half his clothes, it makes Kakashi want to sneeze, and he shivers. He counts every minute they’re away from a fire. They tick by slow.

He remembers being a child, before he’d found his father's body sprawled by their window. Days then had felt like years, and years had felt like ages. Against Genma’s back, hours become centuries again. Nothing is right, not truly, but being carried through rice fields, each wet step meticulous, makes him feel safe. He trusts this man to get them home and that optimism, though likely misplaced, doesn't feel wrong. That's why he latches onto it. That's why his forehead presses into the man’s padded shoulder, focused on fighting off his fever rather than keeping watch of their surroundings. 

It is, perhaps, the fever that’s ruined his priorities, creating this illusion of hope. Kakashi knows this as well as any trained killer. Miles away from their country’s borders, safety is measured by speed. Carrying a near-corpse on blistered legs means they’re on a snail’s pace; refuge will be weeks away rather than the days Genma predicts.

And they both know what falsehoods drip from that statement. Each night before their eyes close, Genma rolls over, grins, swears this will all be over soon. It’s a testament to the pain leeching at his bones that Kakashi finds himself believing that promise more than the facts his training interjects.

Maybe his fever is the cause of that, too, this baseless confidence and shroud he so willingly cocoons himself with, but that doesn’t excuse Genma. 

Genma is just too damn _good_ , he decides. 

Evil follows the righteous. He’d learned that, somewhere. Read it in a book he can no longer remember, but the phrase had stuck to him like his memories, leeching at his waking thoughts.

Genma isn't innocent, yet he’s good. Righteous. Though he lies and gambles and smiles in ways he shouldn’t, he’s a man with the right sort of priorities. 

“I save damsels for a living,” Genma had once said. 

“Do you still save damsels?” Kakashi asks now, barely a whisper, too afraid of being heard by whoever has been chasing them from that blood-soaked grass to here.

There's a rumble inside Genma’s chest — a shuddered giggle — and his eyes slant towards the only one Kakashi has open. “That's what you’re thinking about right now?”

“Yeah,” he admits through the fog of his own brain.

“Well,” he says, hiking Kakashi tighter into his hold. “I’m saving your sorry ass. I'm pretty sure that counts.”

Kakashi snorts, and it's thunderous within the near quiet of these fields. Genma’s foot pauses, listening, waiting, and then they continue, crouched lower this time. 

“I don't have anything else to help with that fever,” Genma says after a while. “It would’ve been better if I were the one nearly dead. You’re better at — ” He breaks off, laughs like the burn of whiskey, sharp and fleeting and replaced quickly by another sip. 

He shakes his head, takes a steadying breath. “This is all I can do, I'm sorry.”

Kakashi presses closer, latches his dying strength around the wideness of Genma’s shoulders and buries his mouth into the juncture below his neck, teeth clamping on the blood-worn jacket between them. It's all _he_ can do; the words he tries to say are nothing but slurred gibberish, and his head is pounding. He can't focus. Thoughts keep slipping through pain, but he’s determined.

“You’re too kind,” he tries saying again. “You should have left me. You should have cut out this eye.”

It’s no use; all Genma hears is a soft murmur breathed into his back, and he hums, hitching Kakashi more securely against him, clutching Kakashi like he isn't — _tender_. Holds him like he doesn't care. His muscles flex, biceps squeezing around Kakashi’s thighs to the point where bruises weep and stretch, but the ache is no worse than his other screaming injuries. 

Kakashi recognizes this snug coldness for what it is: fear. 

The sensation centers him, forces his attention from his memories to the golden waves of rice that engulf them and the hum still surfing through the rib cage he surrounds. 

He can't press himself any closer. There’s no space left between them and Kakashi doesn't want to let go. He suspects the same is true for Genma.

“You should have left me,” he repeats. He doesn't get a response.

He doesn’t know if his words were said aloud.

* * *

Trekking across hard stones and scree is more difficult than winning at a rigged game of poker, Genma tells him, whispering harshly as he hauls them both over the terrain.

“You should lose some weight,” he says, balancing one foot on steaming water and another on a spiked stepping stone. “Think of how much easier this would be if you were a tiny woman. You’d be like carrying a feather, and soft. And there would be boobs pressing against my back. How fucking nice would that be? The fucking best. Literally how I want to die. Boobs against me.” Genma jumps, wobbles on the edge of a rock, and continues, “Instead, I get a dumb man who thinks impaling himself on a katana is an effective battle strategy.”

He snorts when Kakashi grunts. “Don't try to die your way out of this. I saw everything. I was right across the fucking meadow using the treeline as cover like someone should have been doing too, if they were any sort of a good team leader. Which, you’re not. Have I told you that yet? You’re not. You can’t even walk.” He pauses. “That’s not true. You probably could, but I don’t fucking trust you, not after that shit you pulled. Running into a sword. How fucking dumb are you? You could have done, I don’t know, a lot of other things. Not that, that’s for sure.”

Kakashi doubts Genma knows he’s truly awake, just as Kakashi’s uncertain if this is a dream, but he doesn’t complain. It’s almost soothing how Genma’s quiet rants never stop, never pause, never assume that they won’t make it home.

They both still know the odds.

“A fucking _katana_. I’m going to teach you how to use one, later. And, surprise! You don’t hold the pointy end with your chest cavity, you fucking, horrible, horrible man.” 

They both know the odds, and they know ninja can’t survive in Hot Water unless they are quick in and even quicker out.

It’s been four days.

“In three more they’ll think to send a search party. That’s our due date. You’re too important for them to lose, do you hear me?”

Kakashi grunts again, hopes it’s enough, hopes that Genma can beat those odds, because his optimism hasn’t dwindled like it should’ve. Every breath is a death rattle, pulled from the graveyard settled within his creaking ribs, but he can’t let go of that promise. That it will all be over soon.

“So _now_ you’re cocky,” Genma laughs, and maybe Kakashi said something out loud, though he doubts it. “You know you’re hot shit. Of course you do. Of course you’re important.”

He laughs again, like an echo eaten by mist, and hops over the water to the next stone. 

“Of course you’re too important to lose, you stupid, horrible man.”

* * *

Kakashi isn’t sure what day it is, but it’s dark and there’s no fire. Genma’s hands hold the back of his head, cradling Kakashi as if he’s precious, and it’s wrong because there’s not a brace and there should be.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Genma says, face too close to his own, voice too low, too suspicious — too ready to say something too loud, too worried. “You have to get up now, Kakashi. Someone’s close. One of my traps went off. You need to stand up.”

Kakashi blinks at him, at his shadowed skin and brown hair, and thinks that he’s fine with looking at him for longer; except this man — _Genma_ , he reminds himself — is scared, and that’s wrong too. A man like him should be forever confident and boasting each day that he walks by Kakashi in the Hokage’s tower, pretending as if he’d saved their new, drunken leader from something terrible.

“Guess what I did today,” Genma had said each and every time, pulling Kakashi’s attention to him.

“You need to stand up,” he says now, and Kakashi listens because he always does. He hangs onto his every word because it’s only natural for him to do so.

Because it’s still all he _can_ do.

“That’s right, Kakashi. That’s right. Come on,” he urges, and Kakashi staggers forward. “How fast can you run? Fast, right? Faster than them? Of course you can. Remember, you’re the best. Remember that girl you have waiting for you, that little girl with pink hair. Remember her? The one you swore you would train after you found him? Sasuke. Remember?”

He remembers. Kakashi remembers a team and bells and finally — _finally_ — being proud, thinking that maybe this is it. Maybe this is what a family feels like, all over again. 

He remembers how that family had crashed and burned, too. Like a cycle, like the sun and moon and men with two faces.

At least he had tried harder this time. At least he had tried to stop Sasuke instead of pretending family’s a concept that only exists for people that don’t constantly _hurt_.

At least he had wanted to care, this time.

“That’s right, Kakashi,” Genma says beside him. “That’s right. Keep running. You got this. Just go straight and maybe, maybe they won’t. Won’t catch up. Just, keep going, and maybe I’ll catch up, okay? Don’t stop. Don’t stop, do you promise?”

Kakashi can only grunt, only feel pain — like a river, he chants — and hopes that Genma will promise the same. That he’ll catch up. That this isn't goodbye.

Genma doesn’t. Kakashi hears metal find metal, footsteps fading far, and he doesn’t stop running.

He’d promised.


	2. The Teachings Relived

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really should have posted this chapter a while ago, sorry about that. It's been done for quite some time, but life and depression got in the way, as it does. Thank you for those that have stuck with me and thank you to all those that are new and enjoy what's here.
> 
> Just for clarity: remember that Hot Springs is (was) the ninja village in Hot Water.

Dreams of fire do little to warm his freezing bones, but that does not stop him from picturing the dancing reds of firelight and the billowing grey of smoke. It doesn’t stop him from breathing air and wishing it to burn, or from opening his eyes to wet wood and leaves and pain and nothing but endless disappointment.

Kakashi heaves himself off the dirt and knows nothing but the cold even as the dawn rises to greet him, and he begins walking, again. Then running. It's a new day; he cannot stop here.

His chest burns, now, and that's the closest to fire he thinks he'll ever feel again.

 

* * *

He's not alone in these woods. There's more ghosts than people and more birds than both, but there's people all the same and he does not dare to find out who. Voices pierce the wind with laughter, something deep and happy, too foreign for Kakashi to understand. He does not stop for them nor the whistle he hears hours later (or has it been days, he cannot tell which, though he’s nearly sure the moon has yet to set. He sleeps then runs then hides when it grows dark, and then the cycle continues.

It's as endless as his disappointment, but it's better to fear and be disappointed than it is to fear then meet the end.

But it's not fear that's urging him on, forcing him forward. It's hope, and that's more dangerous than the other emotions bubbling beneath his skin. It's what makes him close his eyes and dream of fire; it's why he pauses to catch his breath and waits an extra second longer before moving on, just in case Genma catches up.

But he does not stop for the people in the woods, for there's not enough hope to think they're friendly.)

 

* * *

His fever hasn't broken.

It flairs hot and painful, and Kakashi's reminded of an explosion, like the ones used to breach city walls. Agony bursts against his temple and he leans against the great trunk of an oakwood to steady himself, pressing his forehead into the bark while he assesses his body with what little chakra he can afford to spend. His arms, useless; his torso, gutted.

“You're killing yourself,” Genma would say, sitting at the roots and twirling a twig.

Kakashi thinks he can see him there, if he squints. So he does, just to pretend he's not alone.

“I don't have a choice.”

“Bullshit,” he responds easily. “There's always a choice, and you made yours.” He gives him a pointed look, full of anger and resentment and Kakashi isn't sure if that's his imagination or the truth of Genma's feelings.

Maybe he'll never know, now.

“If I stop running, then—”

“You could have stopped ages ago,” he cuts in. “You could have refused this mission, but now it’s too late and you can't stop.”

“Because I promised.”

Genma shakes his head, maybe sadly, maybe resigned. He opens his mouth to speak, lips moving around words, but Kakashi doesn't know the answers to his own problems so there's only a stretching silence between them.

He stares at him, then. At the version of Genma Kakashi had last seen in Konoha, hair neat and tidy and vest free of blood. He's translucent, tanned skin bleached white, but he wonders what would happen if he takes one step forward.

Would their embrace be as cold as death, or blissfully warm?

His foot lifts, his bandages creak—

He sets his foot down and blinks the phantom away. He can't allow himself to find out.

Where Genma was sitting lay stones covered in green-grey moss, feeding on the trickling sunlight from the canopy above. Kakashi squats down to run his nose across a broad leaf and sniffs. Kalpasi, he recognizes. Edible, but not nutritious.

He peels the moss off with his teeth and chews through the initial bitterness. Without use of his hands, he can’t dry and crush it as is proper, nor can he save any for later. It’s barely enough to survive.

 

* * *

It gets worse before it gets better.

Kakashi runs until he can't, starting at daybreak and collapsing when his stamina fails him. He's too far gone to find safe havens within nature. He falls on solid ground, barely hidden, sleeping with no warmth from either fire or man for a night or three; it's impossible to tell time.

Dimly, like a sunken memory he can only see through a rippling surface, he knows there's a difference between the sun and moon. Knows time moves forward, days changing, but between blinks everything shifts too quickly to count. Flooded plains morph into montane forests. Sunny skies bleed into rain.

It could've been years since Genma told him to run and Kakashi wouldn't know. Only the fact that Hot Water lands stretch around him makes him confident no more than a week has passed.

He jumps quickly over boiling pools. Geysers sprout where the plateaus erode into travertine terraces, and he uses the mist to shroud his scent from the ninja hounding his tracks. They had found him shortly after he’d woken and he had been chased ever since.

Thick trees line either side of him, darkness filling the spaces between leaves and wood, and it's hard not to imagine enemies lurking within, but the only noise there comes from birds and skittering critters. The breaking twigs, the grunts and curses, blare from further behind him, on the edge between the grass plains and here.

They're too noisy to ever be considered a threat, too inexperienced, but Kakashi can't take any chances when he's still miles from the Fire border. He's slow and broken and begging for the end, fever pitched high and only getting worse, but years of training forces him to double back and dive through steam clouds, to sink into rock and breathe through dirt, waiting for them to follow the wrong trail.

It's easy to fool them; they're young. He can hear one of their voices break and squeak when he tries to whisper to his teammate.

“He’s bleeding,” he says. “I bet he'll die soon. Can't we just wait him out?”

She huffs, maybe smiles. Kakashi can only see where their silhouettes darken the mist. “Depends on the man,” she says. She sounds older, but not by much.

They creep forward and further away, tiptoeing around the gore he'd left behind. Their backs face his position.

He could kill them. He _should_ kill them.

His arms are still numb from the medicine Genma had given him, a potent reminder of days where sanity existed, if only barely. There's no way to know if they were apart of the team who'd ambushed them, who had tripped over a trap and given Kakashi time to flee, but he doubts it. Genma would be by his side if all that stood in his way were two kids barely past puberty.

They have supplies though, and his pouch is empty. If his extremities worked, he might hold them by their hair, keep their heads submerged under water until silence overtook them. He might search their pockets for home cooked snacks before letting their bodies sink to the shale pebbles lining the bottom, never to be seen again.

It would not be a kind death, but death is rarely kind. And there are worse ways to die.

Instead, he waits and falls asleep with his head balanced on the jagged side of a boulder. When he wakes, stomach angry, he thinks he should have tried anyways.

Later, he tells himself. They'll be easy to find again.

 

* * *

The feeling in his arms return, but only after Kakashi had kicked a man to death by using the steam from nearby waters to cloak himself within. The enemy had been able to kick him back, once in the head, another in his knee, and more against his useless, flailing hands. The left is broken now.

Not his dominant one; a small mercy.

Kakashi has few techniques that need a single hand to sign, and even less he can use with the trickle of chakra left inside him, but it's enough. It has to be.

The tweed sack that he'd collected reminds him of the one Genma had snatched, but there's little here to help him escape, only a picture soaked in blood and a weapon stored beside it.

No clues either, so he moves on.

 

* * *

Kakashi waits, and he tells himself it’s not for Genma. He sits on a thick tree branch, perched between one trunk and another with a feeble twig trap set below him.

A rabbit, not a person, is stabbed through the belly.

Food.

Kakashi knows he can’t light a fire. The smoke would expose his location to the people still lurking in the woods.

He has no supplies, no water now that the mountain springs are behind him, and Genma still hasn’t caught up.

He focuses on the creature, pretends this is more important. Kakashi climbs down the tree, collects his wire, kunai, and the rabbit, twisting the skin on its hind legs, peeling the fur from the muscle with the one good hand he has.

Kakashi takes a bite and blood weeps where his teeth had pierced it, flowing down his chin and soaking the bandages at his neck. It's not the worst he’s tasted. There was a mission back before Team Seven formed where, well.

It doesn't exactly matter now.

He likes to pretend that nothing exists before his students had come barreling into his life. It's easier believing that dead friends and family were strangers, but he’s never able to forget them for long. Their smiles always invade his waking thoughts.

Toothy grins, mumbled orders, and blood. There's always blood there, too.

Kakashi doesn't like remembering his old team or father, but that's a disservice to their time alive and he’s already failed them enough. He sighs, resigned to inevitable.

The worst he’d ever tasted was rotten pork, carved from a pig the vultures had already bitten. This was after his friends had perished, but before his teacher. Minato hadn't been on this mission, was too involved with other duties, but Kakashi had told him later while visiting his office and they’d laughed because it was funny, because there's humor in needing garbage to survive.

“Give it a few years, you’ll have worse,” Minato had said, hand on one hip, papers in the other.

Kakashi looks at the rabbit, nearly gone, and this still isn't worse than that thrice damned pig, but it’s close.

Genma would’ve bitched about it, but it’s probably not the worst he’s had either.

There was once a story about ants, and he wonders if it had been Genma’s or another man’s tale. They had all been too drunk that particular night, crowded into a bar with no name, sitting on stools meant for children. They’d lifted mugs full of liquor and clashed them together with a thunderous roar. Then someone said a toast to a fallen comrade, retold their last battle, wove words until the circle of men believed their dead ally took an elephant and a man clad in blue down to hell with them.

Years later, in another bar in another land, Kakashi heard that same story from a traveling samurai.

History often gets split between ninja, retold until old scars become everyone’s adventure, but eating desert ants is Gai’s tale, Kakashi decides, taking another mouthful of raw meat.

Then another, because none of this matters still. He's avoiding what does.

Genma isn't here and Kakashi can't wait for him any longer. He knows his stolen eye is too valuable. The obligation Obito had forced onto him weighs heavily, and he hates how useful the sharingan has been, up till now, when he can't turn around because of it.

The mission failed.

Genma is missing.

He can't stop to find whatever’s left of him; he’d promised, but he's never been good at keeping those. He looks behind him to where, somewhere far, far away, Genma lays either dead or alive and maybe he’ll never know what remains.

Kakashi, more than anything, hates himself because he covers his trails, moves forward, doesn't look back a second time. Keeping the one promise he doesn't want to; this too feels inevitable.

 

* * *

Without water, his fever worsens, makes his vision murky, soggy at the edges of reality. A deep fog creeps into the trees, and he isn’t sure if it’s real or a dream, just like Genma’s voice from days — years? — before. He breathes in and the air is thick. Tastes like a shower that's lasted too long. He coughs; it doesn't help.

Each step is slow, weighed down by illness and fatigue. The strength that had carried him from nimble arms to the scraggly underside of Hot Water drags behind him in pools of sweat and blood, left as neon clues to the careful observer. Covering his tracks became difficult the further his path drained him.

His ankle rolls, and he falls. The cough he’d started hasn’t stopped and he curls into himself, grasps at his chest, at the wound in his shoulder, claws at the dirt and hates what he’s become. This is it, he thinks. This is all he is: a man.

That’s it, too. He’s just a man. That’s all he’s ever been. Not a child or a son or a friend or a teacher.

Just a man ready to die.

The fog darkens into the shape of a man much like himself. Tall, imposing in all the ways humanity fears. Kakashi thinks it’s a mirage, laughs at his own face — laughs because this is death and he’s not suppose to feel anything else. Not love, regret, or happiness.

Just like war. Just like he was taught.

“You need to stand up,” he hears Genma’s voice say from within a memory he can't let go. He listens — as he always does — and uses fern leaves to pull himself upright. The fog looks menacing from this perspective. The shadow man, too.

A sticky web flies towards his feet and Kakashi jumps on reflex. He hooks one arm around a vine, swings to dodge the pitfall the shadow man creates and fills with ringlet tendrils. The strands shoot upwards like springs, bouncing and bobbling, attempting to latch around his feet. Kakashi pulls his legs to his chest and hits the ground hard, tumbling to safety, but he nearly falls back into the hole when he stands and comes face to face with the enemy.

Green eyes, Kakashi sees, grabbing him around the waist and taking one strike to his cheek as his elbows lock in place. He twirls them so that he can push the other into the snare instead, but the shadow man lands on all fours against the sunken walls, taunts Kakashi like the audience to a bad play.

“Useless fucker! Tell me where it is!” he yells, and Kakashi doesn't have an answer, thinks maybe this man with no headband is looking for his sanity, too.

Kakashi can’t even respond. He already hurts too much.

Rivers and waters and pain, and pain, and he still has a fever. Kakashi nearly falters, nearly crumbles at the knees, but his one hand forms boar and the pit roars to life. The small fire catches the web too quickly for the man to escape from.

His flesh shifts like sand, blowing away with the hellfire breeze. Kakashi chokes on the fumes, lurching back from the inferno. His good hand covers his mouth as he flees the scene. He can’t afford to watch. Commotion this bright attracts ninja like flies, but the sound haunts each halted step; it’s all screams and never-ending agony, and Kakashi wants to join in.

The man doesn't die quick, and it’s past time to sleep.

He keeps running.

 

* * *

He keeps running and running and running, and when he dreams it’s still of fire, but he awakens quickly, still on his feet, still stumbling through the underbrush. He tries to picture a campfire and a man on the other side, sharpening wood into a weapon, smirking and bitching at him for taking a blade to his gut. He tries to forget the screams of yesterday, because the two memories keep merging and Kakashi doesn't want to believe he’s killed his best friend.

He hasn't stopped to wait since the day with the rabbit. It feels a bit like betrayal.

 

* * *

Kakashi isn't sane enough to fight fair, not anymore, not since the inferno beckoned all of Hot Water to his location.

“You’re just being pragmatic,” Genma would say, because it’s the type of dumb joke he’d think was hilarious. He’s a man who loves when only one person understands his humor, like a secret, like a handshake over the table to say that they were there, together. That they’d lived, together.

But they’re not together, not right now. Perhaps that's why Kakashi feels like it’s okay to be insane. Just this once, while he runs. Just this once as he stops, jumps, lands on a woman and bashes her head into stone.

She dies before she shrieks. It’s her teammate making the noise, then.

Kakashi glances at the boy. Young. Older than Sasuke, looks like Naruto, reminds him of Sakura in the way that he cowers behind his weapon instead of putting that brain to good use. His arms are trembling. His grip is loose.

His stance is wrong, and Kakashi can't teach him how to stand tall. There's no headband to identify him, but he's a ninja, foreign, and he's seen too much.

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi says.

“Please, I’ll never,” he stutters, stops, then gulps. It’s the same voice from before, no longer dipped in mist. There's a squeak pitched between words.

He’s too short to hold his head high and his jaw too round for resignation to square it, but acceptance pales his cheeks and Kakashi respects him all the more for it. Given the chance, this boy could have been great. He could’ve been a legend.

Kakashi leans forward and slits his throat.

He wonders what their mission had been even as he catches the boy’s body, resting it on the ground beside the woman. Probably nothing to do with Kakashi’s failed one, but killers can't take chances in the wild, and he knows that these ninja would have done the same if their positions had been reversed. They had tried to, in fact.

That's what he tells himself. It makes pilfering their equipment seem defensive rather than cruel. Too late, now, to regret, so he moves on, picks up their bags. The dead need nothing, and there’s medicine. Bandages, food, water, weapons — they don't have everything he needs, but it's more than he’d had.

He finds painkillers, ignores them. Pain lets him know where he’s hurt — everywhere — and where to treat first. His stomach, he realizes, looking down and seeing fresh blood seeping through Genma’s previous patch job. He presses a finger to the stitches. They need to be replaced. Half hold strong while one side is torn wide.

Kakashi isn't nearly as skilled with pointy objects as Genma, but he finds a needle and uses the last of his barbed wire to seal his innards back where they belong. He inspects his shoulder next, fixes what he can, moves on to the rest. There’s more bruises than cuts, and less things broken than he’d thought. He binds his left hand tight and straight, trusting that’ll suffice if he gets home in time to have it healed.

If he gets home. His chances haven't gotten any better.

The water he sips tastes like paradise. Kakashi savors every drop he allows himself to take, knowing he’ll need to ration it. There isn’t enough in the canteen to last the journey even if he sprints straight. The packaged jerky is the same.

They were Hot Springs ninja, then, and their hidden village must be within a two days distance if they’d thought these supplies were a sufficient amount. Their clothes were too clean for this to have been a long assignment.

They’d probably been border patrol.

He doesn’t let himself feel regret — he’s not allowed. He can feel that later when he’s not still fighting for his life.

Kakashi grabs the woman’s jacket. It's not his size, but with the sleeves ripped from the seams, it makes a decent vest. It’ll help with the early autumn chill, and it's brown. Easier than skin and bandages when trying to blend against the wood environment.

He stands, stretches, takes inventory and ensures he's ready. There's no way to adequately hide the bodies, but there's also nothing to link their deaths back to Konoha. That's what matters.

He blankets them with a bundle of leaves and hopes for gentle wind.

 

* * *

It’s night and he can't sleep.

He wants to — _craves_ to — but Kakashi hears men stalking the woods. Their footsteps are light, their voices soft, but it's their silence that narrows his senses into pinpricks, waiting for the whispers to return. Sometimes, he hears things that are impossible. Toads croaking at the moon, lightning cackling in tune. His memories are too near to reality, soothing him with days long past and unlikely to relive. Then silence returns like a whip, like a reminder of his duties.

“Complete your mission,” one lash says.

“You’ll have worse,” reminds another.

When only the rain keeps him company, he cradles his weapon closer, begging for any voice at all to return.

Kakashi is submerged inside the dirt floor. The hole he’d created isn't spacious. His knees are to his chest and his elbows are crushed between; his injuries suffer for it, but it’s better here than in the infested forest. Hot Springs hasn't given up their search even after a full day of combing these lands.

He counts each second, minute, and hour that passes now that his head is clear enough for numbers.

Five seconds, three minutes, two hours. Ten.

“ — towards Sound,” he hears one man say, high above, traveling by trees. “He’s injured.”

“ — found bandages in — “ says another, moving close and too far within the span of one leap.

Six minutes. Forty seconds.

Another runs by. “I promise — " and Kakashi strains to hear the rest. Footsteps fade under the sound of thunder.

Then another, older than all the others. “ — kill the bastard slow!” he shouts, and he's gone too.

Some lonely, desperate part of Kakashi hopes these men are better at keeping promises than he is.

One hour. Five.

His arm busts through the ground and he drags himself out, slipping twice before settling on his shins, hunched over. His vision is worse than before. Instead of fog, lights dance around the foliage as if children are playing hide-and-seek with the darkness, beckoning him to come play, to rest, to do anything but stretch himself tall and cover the hole he’d made.

He swipes at the closest glimmer. It wiggles between his fingers, winking, but it doesn't exist between blinks, and he doesn't have time to question his own mind.

Kakashi limps forward, trudging through puddles, hiding where he can when noises stop being imaginary. The scenery doesn't exactly change, and he doesn't exactly sleep, and he’s really, truly not sane. Not anymore. Not since Genma. Not since Sasuke.

Not since Rin, Obito, Minato and his father.

Not since he’d failed the first time, because he hasn't yet stopped. Failing.

Them.

Everyone.

He can't afford to be sane when his chest shudders, begging each pulled breath to be his last. A sane man would sit against the breached roots and let the end hold his hand.

Like he’d wanted, when Genma could still cut out his eye and run to the home he'd said he missed. Like he still wants—

When he finds a clearing, far away from the dead and living, he sees red before reality shifts back into focus.

Night seeps into the gold fronds of a rain garden, moon-shadows coloring the flowers sinister as they spill over a broken brick planter. Kakashi looks beyond the vegetation to where a cottage rots on the hill’s crest. The tapersawn shakes that had once sheltered it from the weather now lay shackled within dirt, splinters piled high. Only rafters shield what remains.

It was once a home; he can see the interior from where he stands, hearth destroyed and wood furniture decaying beneath the rubble of a fallen wall. Flagstones trail to the door sill and he follows them, stops, coughs into his vest. Mildew devours the air inside.

“You’ll have worse,” Minato reminds him. He leans against a beam, papers tucked into the crook of his arm, lopsided smile welcoming Kakashi over the threshold. The yellow of his hair is crisp against the greys and greens surrounding them, but his silhouette melts like summer-hot sweets, the wood behind him etched through.

“I’ve already had worse,” Kakashi tells him. “There was a cave, once. After you died. Under a brothel. They used it as a dumpster, but there was nowhere else to sleep.”

Minato chuckles, reaches a watercolor hand across the endless space between them. Pigment drips past hard lines and soft edges, streaked with starlight and glowing impossibly, and Kakashi doesn't care. He lets the fingers grasp his shoulder.

“Do you remember why we do this?” his teacher asks.

“Of course,” Kakashi had responded nearly a lifetime ago. His legs had yet to grow long, but his posture was straight. It’d been enough for his nose to reach the flak jacket shoulders of the man he longed to be.

“Yes,” he says now as the man he became: a vestige of morality strung along through missions by the words of dead comrades. He’s taller than Minato, and there are more lines under Kakashi’s eyes.

They look nothing alike.

The memory doesn't change. Minato’s smile becomes the sun.

“We do this so innocents won't have to. We do it for peace, Kakashi.”

“We have worse so they can have better,” he’d finished for him, childlike in how his arms crossed, but the older, wiser him, the one standing in a cottage far, far away from Konoha, falls silent.

“That's the spirit!” Minato laughs, pats his back. “Get home quickly, alright? You didn't hear it from me, but Kushina has a feast prepared for you.” And he turns, waves at Kakashi before ducking around a corner that doesn't exist here, brightness blurring into the dull environment.

Kakashi shudders. Kushina is dead, too.

He falls between a toppled dresser and a sink, stares at the skeletal trusses caging this remnant of humanity from the wetlands. Here, it’s easy to pretend that Hot Springs ninja swarm a forest countries away instead of mere miles or less, and perhaps that's why he snuggles against his own limbs and finds a position that doesn't jab stone into open wounds.

Perhaps that's why he lets himself cry — not because he misses a home that had crumbled along with the lives of his loved ones.

He’s older than they were on their deathbeds, and that's surely not why his tears tumble heavier, faster — forever.

(He doesn't like to think about a time before Team 7, and this is why.)

He cries like he should've two decades ago, before all dreams were lost, back before there were dead comrades to miss or friends to sit on stools with, stealing stories so their pain doesn't stab quite so deeply.

And now there's a part of himself too use to lying, just like all the rest, and another that wishes, desperately, to have arms wrapped around his shoulders and lips curved into his neck. For comfort, he tells himself, because here there is only fevered pain and a dull thrum of white noise where his heart's meant to be. Because he’s so frighteningly lonely and he cannot die — _will_ not die — before he saves Sasuke. Trains Sakura. Tells Naruto everything he should have the day he was old enough to know.

They're the only family he has left. 

“So you’re not dead, eh?” Genma doesn't say, doesn't smirk, doesn't breathe into his hair.

Kakashi relaxes, regardless.


End file.
